NaNoWriMo Day 7 Recap: On Fire!

Okay. Well, maybe not QUITE on fire. But, let me tell you about my day yesterday.

I went to bed at 10:30 the night before. Tossed and turned for who knew how long. Woke up to my alarm at 3:50 AM, finally dragging myself out of bed at 4:00 AM, was out the door by 4:40 AM, and working the polls all day.

In case you are unaware of how much work full day election officers do, I’d like you to know that we have to be there by 5:00 AM the morning of, set everything up (including the room, unless you are lucky enough to get in the night before with the permission of the building owners), and get all the electronics running before the early birds come at 6:00 precisely and are angry when we open a few minutes late because they might be late for work (which we all took off, by the way, so they could vote).

If we are lucky enough to have enough workers, we might get fifteen minutes for lunch. Then, rush the last few voters in at 7 PM, and spend the next couple of hours closing machines, counting literally everything, securing everything, signing a million statements, reorganizing the room into whatever it looked like before it was used for election day, and finally getting out of there, if we are lucky, before 9:30 PM.

Then if you are the election chief or assistant chief (or in my case, married to one), you get to drive all the way to election headquarters and wait in a long line with everyone else to get your equipment documented and processed and finally head home to collapse by 11:00ish, and then get up to work the next day. Okay, so I waited in the chick-fil-a parking lot while he waited in the long line. But still. Waiting.

So, next time you go to vote, thank your election officers because they put up with an awful lot to allow you to do so. And also, please vote.

What has this to do with writing, you might ask? Well, in between greeting voters and answering questions, I managed, via whispered voice to text, to write almost 3,000 words! Of course, voice to text is not quite accurate (massive understatement), so I spent a good half hour or more fixing it when I got home, but the word count was still there, and I am proud of it. That brings me up to 15,500 words so far!